Near Archimedes' Syracuse there is one of the most beau-tiful sites in Italy, the theatre of Taormina, which looks out at the Mediterranean and upon Mount Etna, the smoking volcano. In Archimedes' time, the theatre was used to stage plays by Sophocles and Euripides. The Romans adapted it for gladiatorial combat, for the pleasure of watching gladia-tors die.
The sophisticated playfulness of The Sand Reckoner is perhaps not only about an audacious mathematical construction, or the virtuosity of one of the most extraordi-nary minds of antiquity. It is also a defiant cry of reason, which recognizes its own ignorance but refuses to delegate to others the source of knowledge. It is a small, reserved and powerfully intelligent manifesto against infinity against obscurantism.
Quantum gravity is one of the many lines that continue the quest of The Sand Reckoner. We are counting the grains of space of which the cosmos is made. A vast cosmos, but a finite one.
The only truly infinite thing is our ignorance. /